A campaign representing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children has used the 10th anniversary of the apology to the stolen generations to call for targets to reduce the number of Indigenous children in care.
The number of Indigenous children living in out-of-home care has doubled since the former prime minister Kevin Rudd delivered the apology in parliament on 13 February 2008.
“It’s clear that whatever strategy has been in place has failed – consistently so – and it is our children that bear the burden of the system’s inability to get this right,” Natalie Lewis, co-chair of the Family Matters campaign, said.
The Family Matters campaign is calling for out-of-home care targets to be introduced in the refreshed Closing the Gap strategy and is also calling for greater investment in and support of Aboriginal community-controlled organisations to design and run policies around closing the gap.
Less than $1 of every $5 spent in child protection-related services goes towards family support, Lewis said.
“We cannot continue to invest so heavily in responding to the problems rather than investing in the solutions,” she said.
Sharron Williams, chair of the Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care (SNAICC), which is part of the Family Matters campaign, said the position of Indigenous children had worsened in real terms since the apology.
“The national apology, the acknowledgement of the atrocities that occurred, was important for so many people, and for so many reasons,” Williams said. “However, I think we all believed that saying sorry was about more than just the past, and that it was also a resolve to create a better future for our children.”
Events marking the apology were held around the country. A skywriter hired by the Healing Foundation, which was established on the first anniversary of the apology to provide trauma-informed support to members of the stolen generations and their families, wrote “Apology 10” above Melbourne. A similar message was scheduled to appear above Canberra at 7pm.
Nice to see over the skies of Melbourne this morning #Apology10 pic.twitter.com/QYsnxEC4sr
— Matt Steadman (@matt_steadman) February 12, 2018
Earlier in Canberra, Malcolm Turnbull was criticised for leaving early from a breakfast event to commemorate the 10th anniversary.
Prime Minister @TurnbullMalcolm shortly left after this moment with former PM Kevin Rudd and Opposition Leader Dr Brendan Nelson. He did not stay for the breakfast to remember 10 years on of the National Apology #Apology10 pic.twitter.com/nDB4GrNNpG
— Nakari Thorpe (@nakarithorpe) February 12, 2018
The prime minister received a similar criticism last week, when he left early from an event held by the Close the Gap Campaign, a coalition of organisations that drove the formation of the Closing the Gap strategy in 2008 and released a damning 10-year review finding it had effectively been abandoned within five years.
Speaking in parliament on Tuesday, Turnbull reaffirmed Rudd’s apology and said his government had provided $1.3m to the Healing Foundation to conduct a needs analysis to determine the best way to support the surviving members of the stolen generations.
There are about 21,000 stolen children still living, the Healing Foundation chief executive, Richard Weston, told Guardian Australia.
Turnbull said the apology “recognised that skin colour had been used to control the lives of Indigenous people and diminish their value in society”.
“A person’s right to shape their own identity and for that identity to be respected is absolutely central to the wellbeing of all people,” Turnbull said.
Bill Shorten, who on Monday promised to fund a compensation scheme for stolen generations members in the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory if Labor wins government in 2019, recounted some of the stories from the 1997 Bringing Them Home report, adding: “As a parent, I cannot imagine the horror of visiting my baby only to find an empty cot.”
The NT, ACT and Victoria are the only Australian jurisdictions not to have some form of state-legislated compensation scheme for stolen generations members.
The biggest scheme, in New South Wales, began in July and has already provided more than $20m in compensation to 288 people.
The Victorian Aboriginal affairs minister, Natalie Hutchins, told Guardian Australia: “Any stolen generation compensation scheme needs to be led by the commonwealth government and we would welcome discussions with a Shorten Labor government on this.”
